Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Huge difference in the usefulness of spells

When your spellcaster (especially mage) gets his/her turn you want to make it count. A good spell can turn the fight around completely, so you don't want to waste your turn casting a weak spell. Unfortunately that means that some spells are simply not worth casting in any part of the game. These are typically buf spells and defensive spells, but also a few offensive ones as well. The thing is that the fight is usually over by the time you might have reaped the benefits of investing in a defence or a buf.

I found 3 defensive spells that were powerful enough to invest in, and they were so powerful I would never want to be without them: Shield, counterspell and globe of invulnerability. In fact having all 3 makes it very hard for you to lose a fight. There are some cleric spells that may be considered defensive, although they can be used offensively which are also worth memorizing.

Magic missiles is a must. I think around 50% of the time my mages ended up casting magic missiles, mostly because they always hit the target, and bypass all resistances.

Point is there is a big number of spells that are quite useless in comparison, even if you use them creatively. Why then have these in the game at all? Or why not spice them up so they become useful?

Control spells have been nerfed really hard. Directly by reducing their durations and indirectly by making Concentration next to impossible to maintain. Even Wall of Stone had it's HP nerfed from 180 to 30. And Defensive spells usually require concentration, meaning you will lose their effect in a matter of seconds when they flood your feet with fire or you get knocked Prone. Prone doesn't end Concentration in D&D, but here the control and buff hate is real.

Damage spells on the other hand have been ridiculously buffed by letting you cast two or three spells per turn instead of just one. Three Fireballs do triple damage, 3 Hypnotic Patterns are exactly the same as 1.

Offensive spells like guiding light look good on the surface, bit unless you save scum, the miss or nothing aspect makes it almost wasteful to use except in some cases. Concentration spells are annoying. Of all the changes karian made they decided to keep one of my top 3 annoyances of 5e. Lol

I can say magic missile is not at all a must because I've not used it once on my sorc.

In any case, I don't think the aim of DnD is to have all spells be equally useful.

If you think fights don't last long enough for you to be able to get value out of defensive or buff spells, I have to imagine you're not playing on tactician. Because fights can definitely take a long time and often do. A twinned haste in one of these long, hard fights. I've also found sanctuary to be very clutch when someone is on the verge of the death. And then while I don't cast bless there is a ring that gives bless when you heal someone, which is nice when paired with AoE/multitarget heals.

After act 1 I wasn't even able to play on balanced lol. Well I could have maybe, but then the reloading would have become so tedious it would ruin the experience for me. Balanced felt like tactician, and the high difficulty actually shortened the fights, as I was downed before I had much chance to fight back. Didn't know my sorcerer could cast twinned haste lol, I could have used that I guess

Oh, bummer. Yeah, twinned casting haste is nice. For spells like fireball you have to use the quickened spell to use them as a bonus action. If you have haste, that's like 3 fireballs or whatever other spells you want to use in a turn.

For me, I think I only played like 2 or 3 fights on balanced - mainly fights where there are allied/neutral NPCs I wanted to keep alive. I probably could've kept them alive on tactician if I was willing to redo the fight a few times, but I I just put it to balanced for the sake of time.

I think the game, even on tactician, leaves a lot of playroom difficulty wise for just using the spells you feel like using. Its really nice.

Well TIL that EKs can't take blur or mirror image. How lame.

Agree Larian seems to hate concentration spells. They force you to use damage spells like scorching ray and fire ball because they were unwilling to change their beloved DOS combat system as well as the AI.

Concentration spells must be improved. Why is so easy to lose concentration? What about losing concentration in tabletop D&D?

Just nuke everything dead, use every spell slot at level 3+ for fireball, fireball and more fireball.

How boring.

With Haste...

But somehow I can see Larian studios playing their own game like this going "ha-ha now this is fun durrrr boom boom shove" with both enemies and players just nuking each other and the dead being discount-rezzed afterwards. And when it's been "fun" like this for hours and hours, someone somewhere raises the question if it's a bit too repetitive or easy, and then they add 5 levels of Unstoppable to every creature to make it harder and get back to it.

Am I being unreasonable? At least my tactical thirst has not been sated by this videogamey blitzkrieg excuse of D&D gameplay.

The other side of that coin is me playing as a level 4 bard in a party without Gale and suffering from a lack of AoE damage options - 'option' singular really. It's making fight a real slog and even when I win I'm left with a party that's half dead. Currently considering a respec to sorcerer. I'm willing to accept that I may be playing the bard badly but something has to change.

The problem is not (only) Larian but also D&D where for 5E they wanted to keep everything very shirt and simple for people with low attention spans but also prevent any form of preparation which complicates encounter design.

The result is that in the few rounds a combat lasts doing damage is nearly always better than casting spells which would have a long term payoff.

I bring it up often, but a lot of people are unfamiliar with how well Dungeons and Dragons online implemented all the spells. DC casters and nukers were equally viable.

Bards were given sonic spells only for damage, but excelled at it if built that way. Alternatively they could have great CC, healing and whichever build with the best party buffs, everyone wanted a bard in their group, the caveat being they only wanted one bard, so often I was playing my bard and if a group already had one they wouldn't take a second.

Similarly wirards were preferred to sorcerers because everyone loved the CCs more than nuking, but sorcerers could also CC / Instakill if specced as such, but not many players did that.

From what I see in this game, bards don't have any damage option from spells, so mainly just illusion and enchatment, but hypnotic pattern and such are so useless, in DDO you could stop a whole group of enemies with hypnotic pattern with a wake up on hit mechanic, not as strong as hold, but still useful for a PK caster build. Necromancers could use fear for CC too, but the usual thing was to use archmage with +2 DC to main school, +1 to second, and if enchantment wasn't the +2 it would most commonly be used for the +1 alongside +2 in either illusion or necromancy.

+2 Illusion and +1 necromancy was also a thing - Illusion acrhmage got a second PK spell like ability, so now they have 2 x PK plus finger and circle of death and wail. Just kill everything except bosses which had DC immunities and some high end mobs. Mobs that were immune to some things were generally weak to others, so Llolth spiders couldnt be webbed or enchanted but they could be instakilled or stunned. The game didnt tell you this like BG3 does when you inspect mobs, you had to figure out each enemies weaknesses or look up a guide / ask party members.

Even simply magic missile spamming worked with the Shiradi elite levels things, ranged attack and spells got extra damage, stun and ability damage procs, and each missile could proc shiradi stuff, so you just spammed magic missile / chain missile / scorching ray / force missile and randomly but reliably stuff would either get paralyzed, debuffed, or take a load of random lines of damage.

Nah really not. If you use haste and get your concentration broken, the hasted target instantly gets lethargic debuff. I don't like it at all.

I also posted this in the "Focused Feedback: Spells" thread, but just wanted to double post (rant) here about Greater Invisibility.

Basically: don't take it as a spell. It's practically useless. The invisible character has to make increasingly difficult (starting at DC 15, with no bonus for being invisible) stealth checks every time they attack and one failure ends the spell.

I don't agree, concentration spell are very useful i have won several fights using hunger of Hadar as my only spell, cast your concentration spells and run or drink invisible potions, everything is viable with some creativity.

Solasta had a perk "Flawless Concentration" where you basically did not need to perform a saving throw when taking less than 10 damage.
I didn't realise that was not a 5e feat. I guess War Caster and some "+Saving Throws gear+ is the best thing people have...

I also didn't have a hard time with keeping concentration because of dice rolls and found them pretty useful too for the most part. When my concentration broke it was complete user error lol. Or, me trying to cast something that took concentration without paying attention to that I had already cast something using concentration. WIth hunger of hadar it was fine, but in my game most of the time people would just jump/walk out of it TT TT Same with the fog one.

Most useful was the blade tornado lol